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Brimming with brazen sexuality, Madcap Creative creates performances that are meant to challenge taboo. "When someone watches a Madcap Creative performance I want them to have questions," Lila Sage, one of the group's founders, tells Citizine. I want them "to be exposed to something they may have never seen before, possibly even something that challenges what they believe in. Madcap Creative is about playful exploration, about reveling in our bodies and all of the wonderful things they can do. It is about learning something deeper about yourself and what you may or may not be into." Sarah Mann, Madcap's other founder, adds that "Madcap Creative was a way to allow the non-kink community to observe, explore, and understand kink in a non-aggressive way."

Sage and Mann both did their rounds in the performing arts before establishing Madcap—Sage as a dancer across musical theatre, circus, and cabaret performances, and Mann as an accomplished flutist, then as a Dance Performance student at Chapman University.

"I enjoyed finding new ways of pushing my body and story-telling both in the air and on the ground," Sage remarks on her journey to fetish performance. "How can I show the audience what is happening inside of my head? How can I use the space differently? Create thought-provoking questions? Challenge stereotypes of what women 'should' look like? These are the questions I like to ponder."

Mann found herself in the world of cabaret after college, working on performances that fused burlesque and aerial arts. She says that "When Lila and I began discussing the concept of Madcap Creative, it seemed to be the natural progression for my career: to create something I had never seen before." They were looking for a way to celebrate kink as art, and found it in their new venture...

Like any scene, the fetish world has its tropes, most of them centered in dark dungeons where industrial music drowns out the cries of grateful masochists. Here, fully-clothed men paddle the reddening bottoms of woman in black lingerie while icy blondes in shiny catsuits humiliate submissives in gimp masks. Though bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism (BDSM) may have gasped its way into mainstream entertainment (thanks to a certain book about a naive student's adventures in "red room of pain"), the aesthetic stagnates and, at times, alienates.

Then there’s Madcap Creative a new Los Angeles performance troupe dedicated to the softer, more playful side of kink. Co-founders Sarah Mann and Lila Sage describe it as taking fetish "out of the darkness and into the candlelight." Not that there's anything wrong with bondage balls or dungeon play parties, but Madcap's goal is to subvert that stereotype and show curious neophytes that fetish can be fun, accessible and artistic. You can even wear pastels.

Prior to founding Madcap, Mann and Sage found themselves on opposite sides of that same coin: Mann predominantly worked as a dancer, while Sage had been an artist, professional dominatrix and kink educator. Both women were first introduced to the fetish scene as performers in The Toledo Show, Los Angeles' long-running cabaret. Mann said that while not a fetish show, it had a following of "kinksters" and hosted the occasional fetish act. While Mann is intrigued by the fetish elements of the performances, she would have an anxious reaction to anything that too blatantly sexual. When it came to dungeons and the like, Mann has no trouble admitting, "It freaked me out."

“I was interested in [kink], but it’s not something I typically dabbled in in public. I wanted to see fetish in a really beautiful way that people, like myself, who are not necessarily kinksters, could appreciate, enjoy and be open to talking about,” Mann remembers. Sage, however, immediately fell in love, finding both community and a passion for educating others about consent, safety and "the transformative power of being in the scene." Such is often the case with kinks; you don’t always know what turns you on until you see it...

Mike: Every year at Fringe, there’s a show that you go into not knowing what to expect. You then see the show, and like it, but with the days following, you can’t stop thinking about it and the admiration and love you have for it just grows and grows. “Hush” is that show for me.Russell: A new company called Madcap Creative is behind HUSH, and they have created something special. From the opening moments of the show featuring someone playing with items that everyone associates with young girls – dolls – this group is determined to make you think. Throughout the show, there are moments that make you question the connections we make through our lives as to what we expect women to be, how we expect women to behave or what we expect femininity to look like.Mike: They showcase an artistry behind what most people consider taboo subjects. They bring it to the forefront and it’s beautiful to watch. One scene in particular still has me amazed. The skill of how quickly it was set up (and safe). The profile of the woman in the middle of a spin. The peace she seemed to have felt. It was beauty personified.Russell: Mike, I feel the same way, I loved the beauty of that whole scene. Ever since seeing this show, I have been pondering certain images, recalling how certain moments made me feel. There is beauty here. At times erotic and captivating, at times oddly distant and cold, the women in this dream-like series of scenes are challenging us as well as entertaining us.I would also like to say I enjoyed the excellent score for the show. It seamlessly moves from eerie underscore to pulsating dance rhythms.Mike: This is Madcap Creative’s first show and if this is an indication of where they’re going and what they’re doing, then I am in for any and everything they do.

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"Hush" - The Freedom Found in Fantasy...By Earnest Kearney (The TVolution)​Like little boys with their toy soldiers, so, too, are little girls with their dolls: They weave webs of fantasies. But nothing, as psychologists have finally realized over the recent decades, is quite as important as the pretend world of a child.Bruno Bettelheim, in his classic study, The Uses of Enchantment, holds that the human child transcends infancy via a bridge of fantasy. That fantasy liberates the child from the “limited and provisional hopes of what the future has in store for them.”In Hush, the performers of Madcap Creative, take you into the doll play of a little girl left alone in her room. As the girl (Sarah Mann who co-directed) engages with her dolls, they engage her with imagination entering her fantasies as dancers reflecting her own flights of fancy.The troupe creates images suggestive of attitudes and hopes, and of the realms all little girls in our society must test and explore as they discover and defy the boundaries set for them.The Ballerina who brazens forth into the seductress (Alyssa Marquez), the bound and hanging doll (Corrin Evans) who in her rope restraints finds a freedom verging on flight, and finally a carnage of bursting balloons in a celebration of sexuality byLila Sage (co-director of the piece), Zoe Kirkpatrick, Lyssa Morgan and Rachele Donofrio.You can assign whatever significance you choose to the exploding balloons stomped on and pricked: illusions, pregnancy, the obsession with “boobs,” but in the middle of the destruction these take on the sense of liberation of a child when sitting amongst and playing with her dolls.In the final analysis, dolls and toys are the tools the child uses to embody aspects of its personality too complex or intimidating for him or her to fathom.The dancers of the Madcap Creative troupe skillfully expressed how — through the projection of fantasy play — the child masters its own inner processes and is awarded with the potential that comes with growth; and for that a GOLD MEDAL.